Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [260]
'I don't ... I don't know what you're talking about,' Sam said slowly, but that voice - faint, mocking, haunting - recurred: Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman. And his mouth was suddenly full of that taste again. The sugar-slimy taste of red licorice. His tastebuds cramped; his stomach rolled.
But it was stupid. Really quite stupid. He had never eaten red licorice in his life. He hated it.
If you've never eaten it, how do you know you hate it?
'I really don't get you,' he said, speaking more strongly.
'You're getting something,' Naomi said. 'You look like someone just kicked you in the stomach.'
Sam glanced at her, annoyed. She looked back at him calmly, and Sam felt his heart rate speed up.
'Let it alone for now,' Dave said, 'although you can't let it alone for long, Sam -not if you want to hold onto any hope of getting out of this. Let me tell you my story. I've never told it before, and I'll never tell it again ... but it's time.'
CHAPTER 11
Dave's Story
1
'I wasn't always Dirty Dave Duncan,' he began. 'In the early fifties I was just plain old Dave Duncan, and people liked me just fine. I was a member of that same Rotary Club you talked to the other night, Sam. Why not? I had my own business, and it made money. I was a sign-painter, and I was a damned good one. I had all the work I could handle in Junction City and Proverbia, but I sometimes did a little work up in Cedar Rapids, as well. Once I painted a Lucky Strike cigarette ad on the right-field wall of the minorleague ballpark all the way to hell and gone in Omaha. I was in great demand, and I deserved to be. I was good. I was what they call a "graphic artist" these days, but back then I was just the best sign-painter around these parts.
'I stayed here because serious painting was what I was really interested in, and I thought you could do that anywhere. I didn't have no formal art education - I tried but I flunked out - and I knew that put me down on the count, so to speak, but I knew that there were artists who made it without all that speed-shit bushwah - Gramma Moses, for one. She didn't need no driver's license; she went right to town without one.
'I might even have made it. I sold some canvases, but not many - I didn't need to, because I wasn't married and I was doing well with my sign-painting business. Also, I kept most of my pitchers so I could put on shows, the way artists are supposed to. I had some, too. Right here in town at first, then in Cedar Rapids, and then in Des Moines. That one was written up in the Democrat, and they made me sound like the second coming of James Whistler.'
Dave fell silent for a moment, thinking. Then he raised his head and looked out at the empty, fallow fields again.
'In AA, they talk about folks who have one foot in the future and the other in the past and spend their time pissin all over today because of it. But sometimes it's hard not to wonder what might have happened if you'd done things just a little different.'
He looked almost guiltily at Naomi, who smiled and pressed his hand.
'Because I was good, and I did come close. But I was drinkin heavy, even back then. I didn't think much of it - hell, I was young, I was strong, and besides, don't all great artists drink? I thought they did. And I still might have made it - made something, anyway, for awhile - but then Ardelia Lortz came to Junction City.
'And when she came, I was lost.'
He looked at Sam.
'I recognize her from your story, Sam, but that wasn't how she looked back then. You expected to see an old-lady librarian, and that suited her purpose, so that's just what you did see. But when she came to Junction City in the summer Of '57, her hair was ash-blonde, and the only places she was plump was where a woman is supposed to be plump.
'I was living out in Proverbia then, and I used to go to the Baptist Church. I wasn't much on religion, but there were some fine-looking women there. Your mom was one of em, Sarah.'
Naomi laughed in the way women do when they are told something they cannot quite believe.